A dark green pickup idles behind him, headlights cutting through the dark.
My lungs seize. A wild tattoo thumps against my ribs.
His dark gaze settles on me. Not straight on. Angled from under the brim of the cap. His eyes drop to my cardigan for half a second before they snap back up.
Mr. Side-Eye.
“Mae called.” The words scrape out, rough as gravel. “I have a spare room.”
He turns and walks back to his truck without waiting for an answer.
Or for me.
two
. . .
Jace
She’s in my cabin.
I’m three miles up the mountain, dropping a dead ponderosa. The chainsaw screams through the trunk. Sawdust hits my face. The tree cracks, leans, then falls where I aimed.
Clean. Predictable. Not like the woman sleeping in my spare room.
I cut the saw. The quiet returns, but it’s not the silence I crave.
Wind in the aspens. A scrub jay from a pine. A part of my brain that hasn’t shut up since eleven o’clock last night.
I made her coffee this morning. My hands had filled a second mug, set cream beside it, and turned the handle toward the spot where she’d stood last night, looking at the kitchen.
What was I doing?
Four years of my own quiet. Grocery runs. Gas. A nod to Ghost at the pump when I see him. That’s how I like it. Nobody in the spare room...
Mae called at ten-thirty last night. I shouldn’t have answered, but I did.
“There’s a girl sleeping in her car at the trailhead, Jace. In a leaking hatchback. She’s Evelyn’s new consultant. Be a human being for once.”
I should have said no.
I didn’t. I’d already seen her.
I’d needed a quart of bar oil for the saw. Coming back through town, I drove along Main Street, and she was on the sidewalk. Auburn hair frizzing in the mountain air. Wearing an oversized cardigan that didn’t hide her curves with a binder under her arm.
She tucked the binder tighter and adjusted the wool across her chest. But that wasn’t the worst part.
When the afternoon light hit her face, my foot came off the gas before I could think.
Green eyes behind wire-frame glasses. Freckles across her nose. A shape I had no business cataloging.
She’d looked up. Caught me looking.
A muscle ticked in my cheek. I drove the logging road home at fifteen miles an hour above what I should have. Told myself I would not think about her again.
Then Mae called me.
I drove down the mountain in a rainstorm at eleven o’clock at night for a woman I’d told myself I wouldn’t think about.
